This is pure speculation but here's what I think is happening... There's no basis to believe that anybody at Twitter is adding or removing followers as followi

This is pure speculation but here's what I think is happening... There's no basis to believe that anybody at Twitter is adding or removing followers as following somebody is a purposeful action. But...not really. Whether you get a lot of followers (or not) likely depends on you ending up in the "recommended follows" feed. Which showcases your profile to an enormous audience. It's unknown what decides whether you end up in the recommended feed or not, but I would not be surprised if in part it involves manual curation. It may be that currently less manual curation is happening which is changing outcomes. The liberal/conservative point is a distraction from a much more important insight into social media. When you see somebody having 200K followers, many people are naturally inclined to believe that this person is an authority. Perhaps a VIP in the real world, or a person with brilliant insight. Surely this person is dramatically better, smarter, more important than the person with 2K followers, 200, or 20. This idea is based on the naive assumption that 200K individuals came to the rational decision of discovering said person organically and deciding to follow based on merit. Nope. The account was pushed to millions of people on mysterious grounds after which perhaps 10% spent about 2 secs of thought on it, and thought...why not? It just takes a single tap. With critical mass achieved, there's a wide array of tactics to stay there and grow it further, like a snowball effect. None of this is organic.